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Updated: May 15, 2025
The heroes set to with famished jaws, and after the coffee, each negligently lit up his priceless cigar with a bank-note, with the careless and open-handed improvidence so charming and so characteristic of their profession. But suddenly their ease was rudely broken. A single drum-tap made known to all that the enemy was at the gates.
Now not a note, not a drum-tap, not a boast nor a jest illumined their return.
When the time comes that the drum-tap calls to quarters, and the decks are strewn with sand, when with silence as of the grave, fore and aft, the frigate moves stately and proud into the line of her adversaries' fire, then it is that the officer and the man meet face to face, and the awful truth of battle compels them to own their common brotherhood. The merchant-service has few such exigencies.
The Prince of Benevento had by this time resigned his position as minister, and the relations between himself and the Emperor were strained, but he was not rebuked when he ventured on the old license of speech. "It is because pleasure will not move at the drum-tap," was his answer, "and you look as if you would command every one just as you do the army: 'Ladies and gentlemen, forward march!"
A moment later the ground vibrated; a dark, massed column of troops appeared in the moonlight, marching swiftly without drum-tap or spoken command; the dim forms of mounted officers rode past like shadows against the stars; vague shapes of wagons creaked after, rolling on muffled wheels; more troops followed quickly; then the shadowy pageant ended; and there was nothing before me but the moon in the sky above a world of ghostly wilderness.
It was bad to see in the heat of fight; but now in the cold morning, with no cheer or drum-tap or bugle blare, all the glory had gone out of it, and it was just one huge butcher's shop, where poor devils had been ripped and burst and smashed, as though we had tried to make a mock of God's image.
None the less, in the fullness of time 'twas near about midnight as we guessed it we had our patience well rewarded. Hovering on the confines of the camp we heard the muffled drum-tap of the reveille, and soon there was the stir of an army making ready for the march. "Which way will it be, north or south?" whispered Dick, when we had dismounted to cloak the heads of the horses.
The drum-tap, summoning us back to the schoolroom, separated us. What a day I passed, bewildered by my trouble, turning the two terrible sentences over and over again. It would have been natural for me to question my mother; but the truth is, I felt quite unable to repeat to her what my unconscious tormentors had said.
But with my stuffing of straw it came around me as snug at the belt as the coat of a bear. I took alarm as I closed the buttons. For half a minute I had heard a drum-tap coming nearer. It was the measured tap! tap! tap-tap-tap! so familiar to me. Now I could hear the tread of feet coming with it back of the hill.
Then he answered, "Yes, Mis' Ellen, I's a-comin'." He stood and watched the dusty column until the last blue leg swung out of sight and over the grey hills the last drum-tap died away, and then turned and retraced his steps toward the house. Gideon had triumphed mightily.
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